The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921

THE GREAT WAR IN THE AIR

THE GREAT WAR IN THE AIR

Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921

JOHN H. MORROW JR.

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

© 1993 by John H. Morrow Jr.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Paperback printing 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morrow, John Howard, 1944–

   The Great War in the air : military aviation from 1909 to 1921 / John H. Morrow, Jr.

     p. cm.

   Originally published: Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8173-5545-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1. World War, 1914–1918—Aerial operations.  I. Title.

   D600.M565 2009

   940.4’4—dc22

2008025563

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984

For permission to reproduce illustrations appearing in this book, please correspond directly with the owners of the works, as listed in the individual captions. The University of Alabama Press does not retain reproduction rights for these illustrations individually, or maintain a file of addresses for photo sources.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-9143-0 (electronic)

To my wife, Diane Batts Morrow, with love

In memoriam: Dr. James A. Batts, Jr. [1913–1992]

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE

To 1914

CHAPTER TWO

Into the Fray, August to December 1914

CHAPTER THREE

1915

CHAPTER FOUR

1916

CHAPTER FIVE

1917

CHAPTER SIX

1918

CHAPTER SEVEN

Aftermath and Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Preface

The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 is a comprehensive study of the development and significance of airpower in World War I. This history of the rise and decline of military aviation from 1909 to 1921 compares various military, political, technological, industrial, and cultural aspects of airpower in the major combatant powers—France, Germany, England, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the United States.

The years 1909 to 1921 held great significance for airpower. Military aviation and the aviation industry began in 1909. Only four years later, when the European great powers went to war for the first time in nearly a century, military establishments had no proof of the value of aviation. The Great War provided that proof. From 1914 to 1918, air warfare became important as combatants amassed and used aircraft sufficient in quantity and quality to affect the outcome of engagements.

World War I forged military aviation, within a decade of its origins, into an important weapon. Then, in three years of postwar contraction, the air forces and aviation industries plummeted from the pinnacle of wartime expansion to the verge of extinction in some countries. Yet if postwar military aviation and industry shrank to mere shadows of their wartime selves, the shadows cast were long and dark, and the fears they engendered endured. Prewar circumstances spawned wartime developments whose legacy persisted in the postwar era. This nexus necessitates examining wartime aviation in the context of its prewar antecedents and postwar aftermath.

The few general histories of airpower in the Great War are invariably popular, anecdotal, and insufficiently analytical to capture the significance and complexities of the development of aviation in the first major conflict of the twentieth century. They concentrate on the battlefront, in particular aerial combat, air aces, and fighter planes, to the near exclusion of the equally important though less spectacular homefront. These anecdotal narratives tend to gloss over the different national contexts in which aviation evolved, either by concentrating on one or two countries such as England and Germany, or by seizing salient examples from various countries in a haphazard fashion. Such treatments have perpetuated myths about one of the most highly romanticized subjects of military history and have ensured that military aviation in World War I remains primarily a popular but unscholarly subject.

The famous pilots and airplanes of the war are the focus of popular and technical works; the doctrine, politics, and industry of airpower are the subjects of scholarly studies. There often seems to be an implicit assumption that the audience for one realm is disinterested in the other—that the front-line exploits are exciting and of interest to many, while the developments in the rear are dull and of interest to few. Yet the spheres of front and rear, of destruction and construction, are so interrelated that neither can be adequately understood apart from the other. This book consequently seeks to appeal to and enlighten both the general reader and the scholar. Air warfare is exciting, heroic, and dramatic, and it seems to possess an intrinsic hold upon our imagination. Yet its destructiveness, its cost in human lives and material resources, and our persistent tendencies to glamorize it require us to penetrate the veil of the romantic myth. This can be done by examining the air war in its totality through the comparative study of the combatants’ development of air forces and aviation industries.

The air war of World War I evokes romantic images of valiant young aviators clad in long leather coats and helmets, with silk scarves about their craning necks as they peer from the open cockpits of their fragile wooden biplanes in search of prey or predator. Darting about the heavens in their lightly armed and unarmored planes and pouncing on one another in individual combat, they fight tenaciously, win gallantly, or die heroically, their flaming craft plunging to earth like meteoric funeral pyres, extinguishing their equally meteoric careers with scorching finality. Their names—Boelcke, Ball, Richthofen, Guynemer, Mannock—are legend; their lives, terribly short; their exploits, the material of myth. They are the symbols of the first war in the air, its heroes and victims, and the focus of most studies of the subject.

This concentration on the knights of the air stems from a natural tendency to emphasize the heroic. The very circumstances of the conflict encouraged a mythologizing of the air war into a single image of individual combat, deadly but chivalrous. Mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale was rendering individuals insignificant. Aerial heroes provided a much-needed, though misleading, affirmation of the importance of the individual and of youth in a slaughter of both. The fighter pilots consequently became not only the symbols of aviation but also the ultimate heroes of World War I. They were the darlings of the press and civilians, the perfect symbols of an upstart arm that displayed many of the wayward tendencies of youth, in particular a lack of discipline.

Yet anecdotal narratives of wartime aviation that concentrate on the exploits of fighter pilots give the impression that in this mass war of technology and industry, the air arm was merely an atavistic appurtenance in which a few exceptional aces were the dominant feature. This approach robs World War I airpower of its genuine military and industrial significance. The air arms did more than just provide the warring nations with individual heroes, for their individual exploits occurred within the context of an increasingly mass aerial effort in a war of the masses. Aviation played a significant role, first in rendering ground forces more effective through reconnaissance or artillery observation. Later its effectiveness as a weapon for fighting, bombing, and strafing required that it be brought to bear en masse against the enemy.

Concentration on the individual exploits of a few fighter pilots has thus given an archaic, anachronistic image to the most advanced and innovative technological arm of warfare, the one that epitomized the new total warfare in its requirement of meshing the military, political, technological, and industrial aspects of war—the front and the rear, the military and the civilian. The fighter arms and their aces were the icing on the cake of World War I aviation; the unheralded crews of two-seat observation, ground support, and bombing aircraft were the supporting layers.

Military and political leaders had to make crucial decisions to expand the tiny air arms and mobilize the embryonic supporting industries, for in airpower more than in any other realm of combat in the First World War, technological and industrial superiority essentially determined the outcome of the struggle. Critical determinants of the success of airpower were the quality and quantity of materiel. Producing masses of aircraft that would be reliable combat machines was a unique and exceedingly difficult task. The nature of air warfare necessitated frequent innovations and changes in production, and the race for aerial superiority had to be won first in design offices and then on factory floors, as the airplane evolved from an experimental vehicle into a weapon in the arsenals of all combatant powers.

The airplane exemplified the harsh demands and enormous waste of modern industrial warfare, as the intensifying air war necessitated increased production to replace destroyed craft and to meet the front’s incessant demands for more aircraft. It had to be sufficiently simple to lend itself to serial production, yet of sufficient reliability and performance to be effective under rapidly changing frontline conditions, despite its limited combat life. It demanded much higher standards of precision and reliability than the automobile, as many an automotive manufacturer who entered aviation production learned. Airplanes were not like small arms or artillery, which were of standard types that changed infrequently and could be produced by state-run arsenals. Airplane types obsolesced in months, and airplane designs underwent modifications frequently.

Even more demanding than aircraft design was engine technology. The engine is the heart of the airplane, and the invention of certain engine types, as much as or even more than airplane types, ushered in particular eras of powered flight and of military aviation. Yet with the exception of a few works on engines that do not relate their development to other aspects of military aviation, historians have overlooked engines. This study, however, gives aero engines a prominent place, one more reflective of their actual importance than previous histories of World War I airpower acknowledge.

The English have set the standard and tone for works on aviation in the Great War. Their official history, The War in the Air, remains the sole official history of the air war. The Germans completed only fragments of theirs, the French compiled an official history of military aviation in 1980, and in the 1970s the United States issued four volumes of edited documentary materials on the air service in World War I. Furthermore, British and Dominion aviators have left far more reminiscences about their experiences than aviators from other countries. British or Commonwealth historians have done much of the best—in some instances the only—work on airpower from 1914 to 1918.

The plethora of British memoirs contrasts with a relative paucity of French and German accounts. The few German memoirs are often matter-of-fact recountings of exploits. The few French memoirs, unlike British, German, and American narratives, are occasionally melodramatic or gory and often morbid. Yet, among historical accounts published soon after the war, only a French study, Georges Huisman’s Dans les coulisses de l’aviation, published in 1921, both concentrates on the politics and industry of aviation and criticizes its country’s aerial effort. His account contrasts sharply with the laudatory semiofficial tomes that appeared in England, France, and Germany after the war.

Works in English have essentially ignored the French aerial effort, except for the great aces, because the British carried the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front for the war’s last two years. The Germans usually receive more attention than the French because they were the enemy, and giving one’s defeated enemy his due enhances one’s own victory. Historical writing on American aviation in World War I has examined either the air service or the industry, but not both together. I. B. Holley’s fine study of American aviation mobilization, Ideas and Weapons, advances the thesis that the absence of a guiding doctrine flawed American development of the air weapon. Yet the formulation of a doctrine for an embryonic weapon rapidly evolving in a complex web of military, political, technological, and industrial factors proved extremely difficult.

A comparative assessment combining the various secondary accounts with primary evidence from archives and museums yields enlightening insights about the evolution of airpower. This study’s inclusion of industrial production among its emphases necessarily entails significant attention to France, the world’s leading manufacturer of aircraft and engines. Its discussion of all the major combatant powers redresses the general tendency to ignore military aviation in Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Its study of the air forces and the aeronautics industries presents a more complete picture of aviation’s development in all powers than studies that focus on either the front or rear. The synthesis in The Great War in the Air aims to enable a new appreciation of airpower’s importance in the First World War and its intricate evolution in the respective combatant powers.

Acknowledgments

During many years of research for this book, I have received invaluable assistance from numerous institutions and individuals. I sincerely hope that I have overlooked no one in these acknowledgments.

I thank the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., for welcoming me as the Lindbergh Professor in 1988–89. During that time I accomplished much research and writing on the manuscript and made a legion of friends and colleagues: Martin Harwit, the director of the museum; Von Hardesty, Peter Jakab, Joanne Gernstein, Tom Dietz, Karl Schneide, and Howard Wolko, all Aeronautics Department staff; and Tami Biddle Davis, Ted Robinson, and Jacob Vander Meulen, the museum’s visiting staff and fellows. I am indebted to Peter M. Grosz for his friendship, gracious hospitality, and unrestricted access to his extensive archive in Princeton. I also thank the National Archives, my friends and colleagues at the Office of Air Force History, particularly Dick Kohn (now at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Dan Mortensen. At the Air Force Historical Research Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, chief Elliot Converse was especially helpful.

In London the resources of the Public Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, the Air Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defense, and the Royal Air Force Museum Hendon were crucial to my research. I am indebted to my friend Sebastian Cox of the Air Historical Branch for his hospitality and invaluable assistance there and at Hendon. In Paris the Service Historique de l’Armée de l’Air (in particular my colleague Patrick Facon), the Musée de l’Air, the Archives Nationales, and historian Emmanuel Chadeau all rendered significant aid. I have acknowledged those who have given me assistance in Germany and Austria in previous books, but again I express gratitude to the staffs of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg, the Deutsches Museum and the Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv in Munich, and the Osterreichisches Kriegsarchiv in Vienna.

I thank the University of Tennessee and the University of Georgia and my department heads at those respective institutions, professors Sarah Blanshei and Lester Stephens, for their support. Friends and colleagues Lee Kennett and William Leary of the University of Georgia, James Laux of the University of Cincinnati, and Robin Higham of Kansas State University have offered encouragement and directed me to valuable sources. The office manager of the history department at the University of Tennessee, Susan Felker, typed drafts of early chapters. Ultimately, I am indebted to the Smithsonian Institution Press, to its director, Felix C. Lowe, and to editors Jenelle Walthour and Jan McInroy for their work and advice on the book.

Finally, I thank my family. My parents, Ann Rowena and John, Sr., have stood by me through the years, as have my mother- and father-in-law, Ruth and James Batts. My two children Kieran and Evan and my wife Diane have always given me their unfailing support and understanding. In addition to managing the responsibilities of school, career, and family, Diane has been variously a researcher, proofreader, editor, and general adviser through three books. She has made it all possible, and I dedicate this book to her.

CHAPTER ONE

To 1914

"Flying has been brought to a point where it can be of great use in . . . scouting and carrying messages in time of war."

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TO CONGRESSMAN M NEVIN, 18 JANUARY 1905¹

"Everything presently serves war, there is no invention whose military use the military does not contemplate, no single invention that it will not endeavor to use for military ends."

NICHOLAS FEDOROV, 1906²

From its origins flight offered the prospect of a new arena of warfare. Within 10 years of the Montgolfier brothers’ first ascent in a hot air balloon in 1783, the French Revolutionary army had formed an airship company of captive balloons for observation. In July 1849 Habsburg unmanned balloons launched from ships bombarded Venice, though lightly and ineffectively, before the city was subdued by artillery. Both sides in the American Civil War used tethered balloons for observation, while in the Franco-Prussian War the French used free balloons to lift mail and people over the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871. Yet free flight in balloons was a difficult and unreliable proposition, since the balloon was completely at the mercy of capricious wind currents and weather. While such flight could satisfy a thirst for adventure, it had limited military potential. By the 1890s the European armies’ airship units employed only captive observation balloons, of which the preferred type was the German sausage-shaped Drachen. The British army used captive balloons in its 1880s African campaigns and during the Boer War; the French used them in colonial campaigns in Tonkin in 1884 and on Madagascar in 1895; the Americans used them in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The Military and Powered Flight to 1909

The military’s adoption and use of observation balloons paved the way for its later acceptance of powered flight. The military units in charge of balloons usually assumed the responsibility for powered flight. Their operational mobility requirement—the capability to launch or dismantle ships within 30 minutes to incorporate them into an army’s line of march—foreshadowed the early demands that the military would place on dirigibles and airplanes. Ballooning also gave rise to a network of aviation technology societies—composed of soldiers, scientists, and engineers promoting technology—and aeronautical clubs—consisting of supporters of practical balloon flight. Both types of organizations later sponsored powered flight. Historian Lee Kennett points out that in 1883, one year before the dirigible’s invention, Albert Robida’s War in the Twentieth Century envisaged a sudden, crushing air strike, while Ivan S. Bloch’s 1898 treatise on warfare expected bombardment from airships in the near future.³ By the end of the nineteenth century, balloon flight had provided a foundation of civilian and military institutions and established certain expectations for military powered flight.

The French army pioneered military powered lighter-than-air flight in dirigibles. In 1884 French army officers Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs invented the first successful nonrigid dirigible, which was powered by an 8-hp electric motor. Renard, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and in 1877 instrumental in establishing the world’s first aeronautical laboratory at Chalais-Meudon, became the head of the army’s new Directorate of Military Aerial Ballooning in 1888. The absence of a suitable engine thwarted his later efforts to build a 100-hp dirigible and prompted the army to wait until private industry could furnish dirigibles. Overworked and burdened by this failure and the rejection of his candidacy to the French Academy of Sciences in 1904, Renard committed suicide on 13 April 1905. This tragic figure had laid the experimental foundation for French military aviation at Meudon.

The invention of the gasoline engine in the 1880s and the development of more reliable and efficient high-speed gasoline engines in the 1890s made powered flight a definite possibility by the turn of the twentieth century. The French army bought the first military airship, a nonrigid dirigible, from the Lebaudy brothers in 1906 and issued the first contract for a military airship from them later that year. By the end of 1907 the French army was developing a fleet of transportable dirigibles like the Lebaudy ship La Patrie, which was 3,500 cubic meters in volume, 60 meters long, and smaller, cheaper, and easier to handle than the Zeppelin—a newer and more frightening behemoth east of the Rhine.⁴

In Germany in the early 1890s Swabian Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had proposed a rigid airship that would be able to fly for a week, tow transport vehicles in an aerial express train, explore the African interior, fly over the North Pole, and serve as a vehicle for long-range reconnaissance, bombardment, and troop and supply transport. After checkered beginnings—an 18-minute flight in 1900 by his first Zeppelin and an abortive second dirigible—in 1907 Zeppelin’s third ship, the LZ3, flew 350 kilometers in under eight hours. The German General Staff and the Imperial Office of the Interior overruled a reluctant Prussian War Ministry, granted Zeppelin more funds, and challenged him to cover at least 700 kilometers in 24 hours of uninterrupted flight with his airship. The LZ3’s 11,300 cubic-meter volume and 128-meter length dwarfed other airships, but its greater flexibility and load would be partially offset by its dependence on bases in Germany.

A 12-hour round trip by Zeppelin’s LZ4 on 1 July 1908 unleashed such a clamor in the German press that the War Ministry awarded Zeppelin more funds. The LZ4’s fiery destruction on 5 August 1908 while attempting the 24-hour voyage spurred a popular campaign that raised over seven million marks for Zeppelin construction, enabling the count to establish airship and engine companies. The resulting enthusiasm of the General Staff, civilian agencies, and the Kaiser, who had encouraged Zeppelin and would proclaim him the greatest German of the twentieth century before its first nine years elapsed, forced the War Ministry to accept the LZ3 as army airship Z1 early in 1909, before the Zeppelin had met its performance stipulations.⁵ By 1909 the army had also accepted a Parseval airship of some 2,500 cubic meters in volume and 50 meters in length, with its own semirigid dirigible.⁶

In England, as historian Alfred Gollin has shown, the flight of the LZ4 portended a new avenue of assault on the island nation: the air.⁷ Press magnate Alfred Harmsworth, the Lord Northcliffe, had recognized that England was no longer an island when Albert Santos-Dumont flew in 1906, although his conception of the threat as aerial chariots of a foe descending upon England indicated no realistic appraisal of its nature.⁸ R. B. Haldane, who became Secretary of State for War in 1906, was interested in aviation and in 1907 monitored British experiments carefully. H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air, published in 1907, dramatically portrayed the destruction of cities and, ultimately, of civilization by gigantic airships and planes in the first major aerial conflict.⁹ After Zeppelin’s flight of 1908, Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail carried speculations about Germany’s use of airships to invade England. In October 1908 the Committee of Imperial Defense (CID) established a subcommittee on aerial navigation, before which the Honorable Sir Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce testified in December that England will cease to be an island.¹⁰ A General Staff memorandum on the subject in November noted other nations’ efforts in aviation and acknowledged that airships would likely be used for reconnaissance and, possibly, for bombing in future conflict. The subcommittee’s final report was due shortly after the new year. Meanwhile, at the Government Balloon Factory at Farnborough, the semirigid airships, Nulli Secundus I and II, failed to live up to their portentous names in 1907 and 1908.

By the end of 1908 airships had not emerged from the experimental stage. Germany and France led the other powers in military lighter-than-air aviation. In Italy a dirigible built by two lieutenants of the Italian War Ministry’s Engineers Brigade, who had been assigned the task by their commander in 1904, flew over Rome in October 1908. In the United States the U.S. Army Signal Corps accepted its first dirigible in 1908.

At the end of 1908, therefore, the military effectiveness of the dirigible was still questionable, and the suitability of the various types for warfare remained undetermined. At this crucial juncture, when armies were beginning to acquire airships, the airplane burst upon the stage of European aviation. The French army had been interested in heavier-than-air flight before it was practical. From 1892 to 1894 the French War Ministry subsidized inventor Clément Ader with 550,000 francs to develop a steerable flying machine capable of carrying passengers or explosives at a speed of 55 kilometers per hour at an altitude of several hundred meters—a performance that would be some 15 years in advance of aviation technology. In stipulating a military vehicle, the War Ministry was not guiding Ader along paths that he was loath to tread. Like future aviation inventors, he believed that aviation should be used first and foremost in the national defense, and he regarded the military establishment as a source of subsidies and contracts. The early aviation inventors did not balk at their creations’ potentially bellicose applications. They actively sought the military’s attention, often with claims that their inventions would end war. In Ader’s case the army, disappointed at the lack of results, ceased its aid, and in 1898, at the age of 58, Ader abandoned his experiments to write about aviation. Like other aeronautical experimenters before the twentieth century, he had been defeated by the absence of a light, powerful, and reliable engine.¹¹

That same year, 1898, the only other military establishment to sponsor heavier-than-air flight—the U.S. War Department’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification—granted $50,000 for the airplane project of Smithsonian scientist S. P. Langley, whose abject failure in 1903 made the War Department wary of future winged projects.

The only significant heavier-than-air flights before 1908 were Wilbur and Orville Wright’s experiments. After their first flight at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903, they remained far ahead of European competition through 1908. Yet European skeptics, particularly the French, believed either that the Wright brothers had not flown or that their exploits were insignificant. French seaplane designer Antoine Odier and aviator and inventor Albert Etévé acknowledged that the Wrights had flown but were convinced that their achievements were ignored until the Wrights appeared in Europe in 1908, by which time French aviators believed they had technologically surpassed the Wrights. On the contrary, however, the Wrights’ exploits had not been ignored, and French aviators had not surpassed their efforts as of 1908.¹²

Despite their efforts, the Wrights had no military contracts. Although they advised Congressman Nevin on the flying machine’s usefulness in January 1905, the U.S. War Department’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification rejected their offer of a Flyer. The brothers then conducted intermittent negotiations with the British, French, and German armies between 1905 and 1908. The British War Office insisted on flight demonstrations with no prior commitment to purchase, while the brothers, afraid of piracy, insisted on an advance guarantee of purchase if the plane met its advertised performance. French performance stipulations remained beyond attainment, and the Prussian War Ministry found the price too high. The Wrights were unwilling to haggle over their $200,000 price for the machine and patent rights because they were convinced that no one else could develop a practical airplane within five years. Confident of their achievement, yet confronted with these impasses and dogged by the fear of patent espionage, the Wrights dismantled their aircraft and did not fly from October 1905 until May 1908.¹³

Neither the interest nor the negotiations ceased, however. German General Staff Captain Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen advised his superiors early in 1907 that it was dangerous merely to observe foreign aerial progress, but General Staff negotiations with the Wrights foundered on the War Ministry’s continued objections to the price. German interest rekindled French ardor, but once again French stipulations—the ability to take off from any location, to clear uneven terrain, and carry an observer to a minimum 300-meter altitude—stymied the brothers. By 1907 British army balloon chief Col. J. E. Capper, who had earlier been interested in buying a Wright plane, had become more interested in sponsoring the aviation experiments of Britain’s resident American wild West showman Samuel Cody and British Lt. John Dunne. The pressures of the arms race in the early twentieth century kept the European powers, particularly the French and Germans, interested in the Wrights, but not sufficiently to meet the brothers’ demands.¹⁴

The foreign interest may have had some effect in the United States. In 1907 the U.S. War Department sent Maj. G. O. Squier to Europe to study aviation progress and established an aeronautical division in the office of the chief of the Signal Corps, which requested bids for both an airplane and an airship (which it received in 1908). The Wright brothers won the airplane contract, and when Congress failed to appropriate the $200,000 requested by the Signal Corps for aviation in 1907, the U.S. Board of Ordnance and Fortification covered the contract’s cost. Although at flight trials at Fort Myer, Virginia, the plane surpassed the contract’s performance requirements, its crash on 17 September 1908, severely injuring Orville Wright and killing Lt. T. E. Selfridge, delayed acceptance of the U.S. Army’s first airplane until August 1909.¹⁵

In 1908, while the Wrights negotiated, a small coterie of French inventors began to make significant strides in winged flight. After the turn of the century, France had emerged as the European center of winged flight. French army Capt. Ferdinand Ferber, a polytechnician and artilleryman whom Renard brought to Meudon in 1904, managed a powered glide in 1905 similar to the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. Brazilian emigré Alberto Santos-Dumont, the toast of Paris since a 1901 dirigible flight, flew a box kite-like machine 220 meters in November 1906. Although neither accomplishment deserved much military note, in 1905 engineer Gen. Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre recognized the necessity of continuing aeronautical research, although he had reservations about the army’s practical use of airplanes.¹⁶

By then the French possessed the best-known early European airplane engine, engineer Léon Levavasseur’s V8 Antoinette of 24 and then 50 horsepower. The Wright brothers’ four-cylinder engine had produced 12 and later 30 horsepower at 180 pounds. The 50-hp Antoinette weighed only 110 pounds because Levavasseur, through trial and error, determined the minimum admissible engine weight by reducing the parts’ thickness until they broke under tests.¹⁷

The 24-hp Antoinette had powered Santos-Dumont’s hop in 1906, the year that Gabriel and Charles Voisin founded the first aircraft workshop making planes for sale in the Parisian suburb of Billancourt. Capable craftsmen as teenagers, the Voisin brothers, then in their 20s, had built everything from guns to kites. After Clément Ader’s early experimental craft Avion lured Gabriel irretrievably from architecture to aviation, he founded his own firm with 60,000 francs of capital. After an attempt in 1905 to collaborate with another early inventor, Louis Blériot, foundered within the year, he joined forces with his younger brother.¹⁸ On 13 January 1908 the 50-hp Antoinette powered a Voisin biplane flown by French aviator Henri Farman over the first officially monitored closed-circuit kilometer at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The official French history of military aviation proclaims this event the true birth of practical aviation because Farman, flying the wheeled Voisin, was the first to manage to take off under the plane’s own power, while the Wright biplane lacked wheels and required a launching apparatus.¹⁹

Farman had managed to stay airborne for 30 minutes by August 1908, when Wilbur Wright arrived in France to show the brothers’ wares. By December Wright had astounded French spectators by easily outdistancing French competition and raising the duration record to two hours and 20 minutes. That month French businessmen Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and Lazare Weiller founded the Compagnie Générale de la navigation aérienne to exploit the Wright patent. Yet the official French history of military aviation suggests that Farman’s exploit in the Voisin during the fall held more significance for military aviation than the Wrights’ achievements.²⁰ Perhaps French pride led them to denigrate the Wrights’ achievements and exaggerate Farman’s successes.

On 30 October 1908 Farman made the first cross-country flight, some 27 to 30 kilometers from Bouy to Reims. The Technical Section of the German General Staff reported that with this flight of 30 kilometers, a new epoch in aviation has dawned. Farman is the first aviator to leave the maneuver field and undertake a flight to a distant destination—admittedly over flat but nonetheless built-up terrain.²¹ This assessment confirmed Farman’s importance to military aviation in a crucial sense: as long as the airplane’s takeoff was tied to a launching apparatus and its flight bound by a maneuver field, the military perceived it to be of little practical use. In 1908 overland flight demonstrated the airplane’s potential for reconnaissance and communications, and thus its military significance.

In the summer of 1908 the Prussian War Ministry’s Transport Inspectorate, which was in charge of aviation, debated whether to build its own airplane or to aid domestic inventors, deciding to wait until inventors showed more promise. In the fall the War Ministry and General Staff agreed that airplanes would be useful for reconnaissance and communication, but the War Ministry—ironically in view of its reservations about the Zeppelin—believed that the Zeppelin enabled the German army to wait until private initiative perfected a military airplane. The War Ministry obviously preferred to wait for both, while the General Staff desired to forge ahead with airplane and airship development. By the fall some 10 private enterprises around Germany were building airplanes. In October former bicycle and automobile manufacturer August Euler founded the first German airplane company in Darmstadt, followed by a second in November established by Edmund Rumpler in Berlin.²²

In Austria-Hungary, as in Germany, the General Staff wished to take the initiative in aviation, while the War Ministry exercised restraint because of the cost and the embryonic nature of the technology. In 1907 General Staff chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, who was observing foreign developments, was already pressing for aviation forces. In October 1908 Conrad advocated the support of any inventor who had a useful aircraft project, but the War Ministry was interested only in proven machines. Its negotiations with a Wright representative, however, collapsed over price.²³

In Britain J. E. Capper continued to sponsor airplane inventors Cody and Dunne at Farnborough, while individuals like Alliott V. Roe and the three Short brothers, Horace, Oswald, and Eustace, were experimenting on their own. In September 1908 the War Office issued aircraft specifications, which included the ability to rise from the ground under the craft’s own power, thus effectively eliminating the Wrights’ flyer from consideration.²⁴

By the end of 1908 the Wrights’ exploits had also kindled interest in Italy, where the commander of the War Ministry’s Engineers Brigade proposed to establish a flying school in Rome, and in Russia, where the War Ministry considered buying Wright biplanes only months after its Main Engineering Directorate had concluded in April that aviation, while it might be important in the future, was not then suitable for military use. The future seemed to be fast arriving, and with it came heightened hopes and fears about aviation’s military potential.

Even in these early days of aviation, international jurists deemed its destructive potential significant enough to attempt to delineate the ramifications of aerial warfare for international law. There was little agreement among them on the legitimate uses of aviation in warfare—some were willing to allow aerial bombing but not fighting; others were willing to permit reconnaissance, communications, and exploration but not bombing. Peace conferences at the Hague in 1899 and 1907 included discussions of air warfare. In 1899 concern for the dirigible’s potential as a bomber had led to five-year prohibitions against the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons and against bombing undefended towns and cities. Yet this decision was obtained only in the absence of effective and proven bombers, since the French, German, and Russian representatives would not foreclose using new weapons in warfare. In 1907 the Hague conferees agreed only not to bomb undefended towns and villages.²⁵ The closer the aerial machine drew to usefulness as a weapon, the closer international jurists edged to acknowledging its legitimacy as a weapon. Admittedly, within four years British international lawyers would lament the very existence of flying machines, as did some British military figures. Yet such anomalous wishful thinking undoubtedly reflected the aerial weapon’s potential to affect Britain more profoundly than the continental powers, since it made the British vulnerable to a threat with which they had always contended—attack and invasion from their neighbors.

In France and Germany a popular clamor for aviation, particularly military aviation, became more apparent in 1908. Edmond Petit pointed out that during 1908 aviation became a universal preoccupation in France and aviators became popular heroes.²⁶ While he attributed this change in public attitude to the aviation press, also underlying the publicity were the recent dramatic achievements of Zeppelins and airplanes. As airships and airplanes impressed the public, military aviation leagues formed in Germany and France. The German Air Fleet League, modeled after the German Navy League, was formed to promote military aviation in the summer of 1908. By 1909 it had 3,000 members and a board of prominent military, industrial, and political figures including Ernst Bassermann, parliamentary leader of the National Liberal Party. In France in September 1908 propagandist René Quinton formed the National Aviation League, whose vice president was Paul Painlevé, a future prime minister and war minister. By February 1909 the Senate and Chamber of Deputies contained groups on aerial locomotion, the latter having 82 members. Farsighted civilians began to envisage the possibilities of military aviation. In late 1908 Prince Pierre d’Arenberg, president of a provincial automobile club in the department of Cher, conceived of making the department an aviation center. From this seed, through civil-military cooperation, would grow France’s largest prewar flying school and famous wartime training field at Avord.²⁷

The circumstances surrounding the German army’s acceptance of the Zeppelin Z1 in 1908, when the public had actively intervened to promote the Zeppelin to the War Ministry, indicated that governments would have to contend with public opinion—a new factor in their decisions on military aviation. Previously military aviation had aroused virtually no public interest, and the military had been able to approach aviation in relative isolation. By the end of 1908, flight was being drawn into the web of increasingly bellicose popular attitudes encouraging militarization, and these formed the context for European aviation’s development in the five-and-one-half years left before the war.

Historians have often judged European military establishments to have been conservative in their attitudes toward technological innovation, and have faulted the military leadership for its alleged reluctance to adopt the airplane.²⁸ Yet no sponsors stood ready to develop aviation for commerce or sport beyond the prizes for distance flights offered by the press or interested individuals. The military response was certainly less conservative than that of other European institutions.

The French army, true to its long aeronautics tradition, led other armed forces in its support of powered flight. Aviation historian Lt. Col. René Chambe, writing before World War II, claimed that in many cases the army, by rational utilization, was able to give inventions a practical quality and to enable a development to which their inventors could never have aspired if left to their own devices.²⁹ Yet Ader’s example suggests some exaggeration of the army’s constructive role on Chambe’s part. The French War Ministry had supported Ader handsomely, but its requirements were not practical. In its zeal to have a military instrument, the War Ministry’s stipulations were far beyond the current aviation technology. In fact, the military essentially capitalized on the initiatives of the successful early inventors like Zeppelin, the Wrights, Levavasseur, and Voisin. Nevertheless, the French War Ministry—especially when compared to the more cautious attitude of other European war ministries—deserves much credit for its sponsorship of aviation inventors at the early stages of powered flight.

Within both the military establishment and the aviation industry, individuals who would prove instrumental to World War I aviation had already begun to play significant roles by 1909. German General Staff Capt. Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen, who encouraged the army’s active espousal of aviation in 1907, would become the key figure in wartime German aviation and the architect of the German army’s air service. Lieth-Thomsen’s superior in 1908, Erich Ludendorff, an ardent advocate of aviation, would be commander in 1916 to 1918, as the Chief Quartermaster General who directed the war effort in its final two years. In France Gen. J. J. C. Joffre, who chaired the commission on Ferber’s experiments in 1905, commanded the army during the first two years of the war. The military aviation research institute at Meudon had become a repository of aviation expertise. Lieutenant J. B. E. Dorand, for example, who was first assigned to Meudon in 1894, would be a wartime chief in the French aviation procurement bureaucracy. Within the aviation industry, both Voisin and Farman became important to the war effort.

The invention of suitable engines determined the boundaries of achievement of flight. In the heyday of the Antoinette and the Wrights’ engine, firms such as the Gnome engine company and the Renault automobile firm were already at work on superior designs that would raise flight to higher plateaus. Succeeding years would witness the rise of the aero engine industry and its production of more reliable and powerful engines, enabling flying machines to become practical instruments of warfare.

In 1908, however, such reliability lay in the future. The airship and the airplane were still in their infancy and their suitability for military use was more a matter of conjecture than proven fact. Aviation everywhere was of low military priority, which was compounded in countries such as Austria-Hungary and Russia by the relative lack of a substantial industrial base and government funding. By the end of the year aeronautics was on the verge of acceptance by the military establishments; 1909 to 1914 would witness its transformation into an instrument of modern warfare.

The Military and the Origins of the Aviation Industry, 1909–1911

"In 1909 powered aviation came of age. The aeroplane became technically mature and established in the public mind . . . , and the beginnings of national aircraft industries, as well as government concern for aviation, were now to be seen throughout Europe."

CHARLES R GIBBS-SMITH³⁰

In 1909 French achievements—Louis Blériot’s crossing of the English Channel in July and the Reims aviation week in August—stimulated aviation development and military interest everywhere. The workshops of a small coterie of talented aviator-designers, particularly the two Voisin and three Farman brothers, Louis Blériot, Louis Breguet, Alfred de Niéport, and Robert Esnault-Pelterie (known by his initials REP) formed the nucleus of France’s prewar aircraft industry. As bourgeois, they enjoyed a certain material ease that enabled their pursuit of the fanciful goal of flight. The Voisins had inherited their grandfather’s wealth; REP, who held a degree in physics, was the heir of a wealthy cotton manufacturer; Niéport was the son of an army colonel; Blériot, who had managed a Paris automobile headlight factory, was an engineer and mathematician trained at the Ecole Centrale; Breguet was an engineer working in his father’s electrical equipment factory; and Henri and Maurice Farman, who had gravitated from bicycle racing and automobile sales to aviation, were the sons of a British journalist residing in France. They were all independent inventors and test pilots and all, except Dick Farman, earned aviator’s brevets in 1909, the first year of the aviator’s license. Voisin’s firm, the oldest, had fewer than 20 employees in 1909. This small work force, which included the owners, built each part of the plane successively, acquired parts they could not produce from the sawmills, foundries, and lathe shops of Paris, and then, using primarily hand tools, assembled the planes one at a time on a frame in the middle of the workshop. These shops’ financial condition remained precarious as the inventors struggled to find a lucrative market.³¹

Equally crucial to French aerial ascendancy were the engine manufacturers. Blériot’s monoplane vaulted the Channel powered by a light, compact three-cylinder fan-type air-cooled engine of 24.5 horsepower. It was designed and built by Italian Alexander Anzani, a temperamental self-taught mechanic and former motorcycle racer, who fired workers when engine tests failed with le direct, the jab, ejecting them bodily from his employ and leaving them with black eyes or missing teeth as severance pay.³² Anzani also developed the first practical air-cooled radial engines, three-cylinder types, producing first 22.5 and then 35 horsepower in 1910. Before and during the coming war these engines would equip nonflying French trainers, called rouleurs or pingouins, that accustomed student pilots to the feel of a plane on the ground and on the verge of flight.

Perhaps the single most important prewar engine was the famed Gnome rotary, which gave tremendous impetus to European aviation. Invented by Laurent Séguin, the Gnome first appeared in 1908 in a five-cylinder version but evolved quickly into its classic forms, a 50-hp, 165-pound seven-cylinder engine in 1909 and a later 80-hp nine-cylinder model. Gnome, the Séguin family’s firm, had been founded in 1905 to build internal-combustion engines but had lost money until its beautifully crafted little engine dominated the Reims air meeting.

In the usual engine configuration the cylinders are fixed around (in the radial or fan-type engine) or along (in the in-line) the crankcase, in which the crankshaft rotates. In the rotary the cylinders whirled around a fixed crankshaft with the propeller, creating gyroscopic movements that initially frightened some aviators. Rotaries had no carburetor to regulate fuel flow and thus engine speed, so the pilot reduced power for landing by intermittently cutting the ignition, relying on the continued whirling of the engine and unabated fuel flow to restart as necessary. A cowl kept the unused, sometimes flaming, oil and gas that shot out of the revolving cylinders from setting the plane on fire, but nothing could protect the pilot from the fumes of castor oil, the sole lubricant capable of withstanding the heat and pressure inside a rotary. If this seemed rather hazardous, early flight was fraught with hazards, and Gnomes compensated with their light weight, power, and reliability. They would be imitated by many builders and exported to all countries, as early fliers soared to new heights powered by their whirling pistons.³³

French feats increased the soaring popularity of flight, already evident in 1908. The cradle of French aviation, Issy-les-Moulineaux along the Seine outside Paris, became the rendezvous of the social elite, who arrived fashionably attired in their automobiles. These aerial meetings attracted gigantic crowds—an estimated 250,000 delirious spectators at Reims in 1909, another 200,000 at the races at Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1911—whose infatuation with and faith in aviation electrified French builders. Aviation became the newest sport, attracting former bicycle, motorcycle, and automobile racers. The aviator, the newest daredevil, worshipped by crowds of adoring followers—particularly women—possessed an allure that carried over into wartime. In this heady milieu, the aviator had to be the essence of sangfroid, as Gabriel Voisin demonstrated when he impudently suggested to an impatient and unruly mob, You have waited ten thousand years to see man fly; you can certainly wait ten minutes more.³⁴ This national passion for aviation was the essential context for the French army’s adoption of the airplane.

The Reims air meeting provided the catalyst for French military aviation.³⁵ Before that the small air arm of the War Ministry’s Engineers Directorate under General Roques had considered the airplane potentially useful. After Reims the engineers bought two Farmans, two Wrights, and one Blériot to familiarize their officers with the sport. By then they were not alone in their interest in airplanes. At Reims French artillery officers conceived of using airplanes to locate targets for their vaunted 75mm cannon, and in November the artillery established an air service at Vincennes with five airplanes under the command of an inventive and aggressive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Estienne. Although the War Minister, an artillery general, expediently attempted to justify the division by assigning short-range spotting to the artillery and longer-range reconnaissance to the engineers, this dichotomy was potentially disruptive. From its origins French military aviation would be dogged by bureaucratic fragmentation and infighting between engineers and artillerymen.

Coinciding with the rise of the airplane, the fiery crash of the dirigible le République on 25 September 1909, killing its crew of four, convinced some observers that the dirigible was obsolete. Yet the army bought three airships in 1909, including one after the crash, because the airplane’s exact use was uncertain, and the dirigible’s superior range and load compensated for its cumbersome characteristics on the ground. Furthermore, the acquisition of airplanes and training of pilots were subject to delays.

The civilian aircraft industry delivered first to private buyers who paid higher prices than the state, thereby delaying military procurement and forcing the army to train pilots at the industry’s schools. There sportsmen and wealthy foreign officers, who paid their own way, received priority in training and aircraft over French officers, who in turn resolved to begin the army’s own flight-training program.³⁶ In the summer of 1910 Roques assigned the first breveted military aviators to run new military flight schools at Châlons and Vincennes, which trained 52 army and 6 navy pilots, primarily on Farmans and Blériots, by the end of the year. The military brevet examination, like the civilian, entailed three closed-circuit flights of five kilometers, but the military emphasized cross-country flights. After graduation the officers participated in civilian competitions to hone their skills and stoke the public’s interest in military aviation, encouraging such grants as a subscription from the newspaper Le Temps, which bought the army four airplanes and a dirigible, and banker Lazare Weiller’s 25,000-francs award for the longest nonstop flight by a military aviator with a passenger.

Early in 1910 the struggle within the military bureaucracy for control of aviation extended into the parliament, where under interpellation the War Minister found the division of aviation difficult to justify. In March the senate and government adopted Senator Reymond’s proposal that the War Ministry group aviation units as quickly as possible in one autonomous service. On 9 June, two days after the War Minister announced his intention to place the entire aeronautical service under the Engineers Directorate, two artillery fliers staged a spectacular long-distance flight that was designed to mobilize political opinion against the engineers’ absorption of the artillery air arm. The fliers became the first airplane pilots to receive the cross of the Legion of Honor, and their feat provoked a challenge to the proposed reorganization from the artillery lobby in the Chamber of Deputies on 20 June, but the War Minister advised that the new arrangement would save some 200,000 francs and might prepare the way for aviation’s autonomy.

In September, in Picardy where deep valleys and apple orchards made landing and observation difficult, and constant, strong, and occasionally violent winds made even flight hazardous, the tiny French air arm became the first to participate in military maneuvers. Dirigibles could not fly, but the eight airplanes, piloted by active officers and civilian reservists, sortied on five of the six days despite crashes, clearly demonstrating, to the praise of aviation publications and Le Temps, that airplanes could be used effectively for reconnaissance and liaison.³⁷ Before the maneuvers, Roques was uncertain of aviation’s future; afterward he observed to the War Minister that airplanes are as indispensable to armies as cannon or rifles.³⁸

On 22 October 1910 the War Ministry established in the Engineers Directorate a permanent Inspectorate of Military Aviation over all aviation agencies, although artilleryman Estienne at Vincennes continued to report directly to the War Minister until the fall of 1912. General Roques, now fully convinced aviation’s merits, relinquished command of the Engineers Directorate to become the first inspector and promptly set out to improve the quality of planes and pilots. On 7 November he announced a 300-kilometer speed competition for three-seat military airplanes. The prizes of contracts for 10, 6, and 4 planes for the first three finishers, respectively, were designed to stimulate competition in the industry to build heavier military types, although a year would elapse before the competition was held.

In 1911 the army imposed more stringent demands on its pilots. On 13 July 1911 Colonel Hirschauer, commander of the Flying Troops, observed that individual exploits, such as long-range flights to impress the public, were less important than the abilities to follow orders, to fly in weather that civilians would not risk, and to function as a team under a single command.³⁹ A new military brevet in 1911 that required three flights of 100 kilometers was passed by only 31 pilots, the first of whom was Lt. Tricornot de Rose, the commander of the first French Pursuit Group during the coming war. The aircraft competition’s stipulation of three-seat airplanes, Hirschauer’s memorandum, and the new military brevet indicated the growing divergence of military from civilian aviation by 1911.

The fall maneuvers demonstrated that airplanes could locate an enemy’s exact position at 60 kilometers and that two-seaters were superior to single-seaters for reconnaissance, and also suggested the need for squadrons of similar airplanes, which were introduced in 1912. General Roques further contemplated the need for airplanes equipped with weapons to fight aerial adversaries and projectiles to bomb and demoralize enemy troops. He was not alone in conceiving of the airplane as a weapon. In 1909 Clément Ader, envisaging a short war, foresaw that airplanes would be used to create terror by raids on cities, attacks that could only be prevented by the formation of an independent air force. In 1910 Lt. Albert Etévé of Meudon had contemplated the potential effects of bombing attacking skirmishers. In the Revue générale de l’aéronautique militaire in 1911, Belgian officer Lieutenant Poutrin suggested that the aerial bombardment of urban centers and government capitals could disorganize a nation’s life and weaken its morale. The artillery flyers had already attempted the first bombings with shells and fléchettes (metal antipersonnel darts) when Roques